Amoral and gore cinema summit of the late 1980s, Nekromantik comes in a beautiful box including Bluray versions of the 2 films and tons of bonuses at ESC Editions, prior to its posting on Shadowz November 17th... Retour critique sur ce pan extreme du cinéma germane avec une conseil de viewage : do not see this film after eating...
It's clean!
Robert (Daktari Lorenz) works as a cleaner in Joes Street Cleaning Agency. A very special cleaner since he does not take care of emptying the trash or taking care of the sanitary, but rather to rid the corpses of crime scenes or other road accidents... A job particularly relevant since Robert and his girlfriend (Beatrice Manowski) enjoy amplifying their sexual chats with the bodies he picks up during the day. But when Robert was fired because of his schemes, his couple exploded...
Jörg Buttgereit He was born in Berlin in 1963 and, as a filmmaker, devoted himself to creating pastiches of horror films which he loved so much. Yet he will really be known thanks to the diptych Nekromantik (1987 for the first, 1991 for the second) devoted entirely to the well crado topic of necrophilia. A sexual perversion hardly addressed in cinema (we think of Vertigo Hitchcock, under the purely metaphorical prism, or Lisa and the devil of the Mario Bava Buttgereit's goal is to keep the censorship going and, of course, to mark the history of horrific cinema forever.
Horror documentary?
Turned entirely in Super 8, 1.33:1 format and granular image brings to Nekromantik an inimitable stamp (and little seen in the cinema, the Super 8 being rather a format reserved for amateurs than for professionals who obviously preferred it the 16 mm). This provides the film with an aura that removes, in the viewer's mind, cinematographic productions and its riggings, thus instilling, unconsciously or not, an almost documentary claw. Coupled with the archive images (including the killing and removal of a rabbit), this veritable intrusion within the film makes a spectator feel the unbelief of a spectator all the more uncomfortable in front of the burst of violence, obscenity and immorality that will follow.
Yet, despite its extreme side, the film is not strictly speaking gore, on the contrary. He constantly attaches himself to his quasi-documentary aspect, which was described earlier, but also to his naturalist will in the sense that Deleuze evokes by invoking a realism that "extenses its features by prolonging them in a particular surrealism". The middle – an apartment hidden behind an anonymous facade, returning several times in the film – hides what the image-pulse of Nekromantik reveals us to be a couple of necrophiles. Thus opens up in the daily sphere (the building depicted) a subworld almost horrific, which no one suspects.
A subworld into which a part of the outside world (a fetish) is brought in by obeying sick impulses: tips of organs, limbs, bones, which are cut to these corpses and which are carefully kept on a shelf, well stored in formol. The apartment becomes the home of a predatory couple, their impulses and fetishes, creating in parallel a new universe where the laws (attraction, excitement, morals) adjust to its two occupants until they appear perfectly normal. This is evidenced by the music of the sex scenes between the two necrophiles and their recent machabée: romantic, guillerette, betraying the inner emotional state of the characters while it seems to us, to us spectator, absolutely dissonant and in step with what is played on the screen.
Nekromantik, an operating movie?
A film that is much more subtle than it seems, the aim of which is never that of a cinema of exploitation, nor is it that of a film of author where one would control its effects, its frames, its light. Everything in Nekromantik It is a matter of debugging (the organs of animals requested by the director from slaughterhouses, by pretending to be a medical student, up to the many practical effects deployed in the feature film), of the noblest but also the most amateur hand, without ever giving way to any notion of control. The image jumps, trembles, the focus is random, the frames not always neat, the transitions sometimes bankal and the sound effects rarely properly captured, and yet! This whole list, which could be read as so many defects, adds to the documentary description that was previously made available and supports the credulity of the spectator perfectly deprived in front of this particular object which would seem to be taken on the alive.
And this schism between Buttgereit's cinema and conventional exploitation cinema, we find it within Nekromantik in a scene where Robert goes to the cinema to see a slasher shot by Buttgereit himself (on which he joined a part of the soundtrack of Hell of the Zombies of Fulci). The room, heteroclite, laughs and befells at the sexual violence and exaggerated of the film: Robert holds a few minutes before going, visibly angry at this show where he does not find any ounce of credibility. And definitely, that's not what we feel in front of us. Nekromantik…
Yet Jörg Buttgereit will offer a burst of this excessive hemoglobin and theatrical violence at the very end of the Nekromantik, where Robert will eventually die in a literal explosion of cum and blood. A macabre but comical burst of outburst, which awakens a spectator plunged into an ever worse torpor. Finally, he finds a little distance from the tangible reality of the film. A airlock, sort of, before the credits and the return to the real world, and a taste of what will be Nekromantik 2 (giving much more room for humour and freedom).
German horror
Besides, it is probably no coincidence that this pivotal film in horror history was created by a German. Resurgence of the atrocities of a country still deeply marked in its flesh by the horror of the Holocaust, Nekromantik probably could not have been created in the same way elsewhere. Bannie, rejected, Buttgereit's work had to wait long before reaching its status as a cult film that surrounds it today. A particularly interesting theme, developed by Linnie Blake in an academic article entitled The horror of the Nazi past in the reunification present: Jörg Buttgereit.
Anyway, Nekromantik is not just the simple work of a clever little one with the pure will to shock, but hides in his amateur circumvolutions and crashes multiple levels of reading that should be explored deeply. A film which is particularly well accompanied by the multiple bonuses produced by ESC distribution, and which will be visible from November 17 on Shadowz. An important work under its little shock film, which you can extend with the second part (Nekromantik 2) and by German Angst, a film in three segments including one directed by Buttgereit himself. Good luck!
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